Successful?

In the recent years, I've been hearing this a lot:

"I will be successful in the future."

It's almost a trend among young people to say something like that. There's nothing wrong with having great ambition, really. I just feel that you need to stand on solid ground. Before you go about prophesising your success, you'd best make sure your confidence is justified. I'd say about 90% of the people I know who have said that, do not have sufficient justification to make that claim.

How could I possibly tell? From their level of intelligence? Nope. Some successful people in the past have had mediocre intelligence at best. Similarly, some very intelligent people have struggled to achieve any success at all. Is it their willingness to work hard? Maybe, but not exactly. It can be observed that many intelligent and hardworking individuals fail to achieve success. (What I said, of course, is just a generalized claim I make with no substantial evidence other than my own observations. I will not go to great lengths to prove what I just said, so for the sake of discussion, just assume my observations are correct.)

What is it, then, that triggers my BS detector each time I hear something like that? There are usually at least two things about the person in question that almost guarantees the lack of success in the future. Don't believe me? The next time you hear a stuck-up bastard claiming he will be successful in the future, there are two questions you can ask that will most probably stump him.


Question 1: "What does success mean to you?"

What constitutes success to the person in question? Is it money? Position? Fame? Whatever it is, you need to know what you want to achieve. How can you achieve success without knowing what success actually means? This is actually a very difficult question to answer, and I'd imagine many people would have problems defining their own version of success. Nevertheless, it is important to have a clear idea, or at least some idea of what you would deem to be "success".

If you do not have clearly defined goals, it is likely that you will have no idea what you are working towards in life. You need to set goals. You need to set long-term goals. You need to set goals you want to achieve in the next couple of months. Or even weeks. In fact, you should set goals you want to achieve today. Without goals, your life is without direction. It's like hopping onto a car and driving around the city with no idea where you're going to end up. Before you know it you've run out of gas. No doubt, some will end up in a comfortable place and say to themselves, "Yeah, this is a good place to stop". Others will end up in the crappiest part of the neighbourhood. Is it worth taking that risk?

Now I'm not saying the people in question do not have clearly defined goals. In fact, many of them probably do. But are those goals realistic? How do you assess the feasibility of setting such goals? That brings me to question #2.


Question #2: "How are you going to achieve the said goals?"

That translates to "do you have a proper plan?".

You need a plan. A good plan. Without a plan, setting goals is meaningless. I can set lofty goals for myself any time of the day with little difficulty. Achieving them is a different story.

I can announce to the world that my goal is to date that cute girl who sits in the corner of my tutorial class, but if I don't actually have a plan, I'll fail miserably.

Err.. well, you get the point. The message here is you need to have a plan. Even a football team wouldn't go into a match thinking they'd win the game if they didn't have a strategy, let alone top the league. Similarly, in life you need a good strategy.

If success to you is defined by the money you make, how do you plan to save your money? Where will your finances go? To the stock market? To real estate? Some other obscure investment plan? Based on the average salary of people in your field, have you calculated whether or not it is likely that you will be able to, in the near future, buy a house? A car? Fund your children to college? It's more likely that you're thinking of spending your money in a shopping spree. For a new phone. New clothes. A vacation in Phuket. Earn money and then spend it immediately. How is that a good plan?

I'd be surprised if those people proclaiming future success would have any plan at all.

So anyway, the point is that many of these people do not have sufficient justification for their claims. What constitutes justification has been discussed. I find it extremely irritating when people say "I will be successful in the future" when all they have to show is unrealistic goals with no proper planning.